I'm so glad that I played Max Payne 3 on PC, because these RAGE games seem to run like utter dogshit on consoles.

But, you know, even ignoring the horrible aliasing, low draw distance with LODs and shadows visibly popping in, subpar performance, and ridiculously long loading screens, the game just straight up looks ugly. If you move far enough away from the TV, some of the scenery looks really nice (because you can't see that most of it is LODs), although the colors are still rather dull, but the interiors are just horrendous. Blurry textures, primitive lighting, it looks worse than Aliens: Colonial Marines upon release. I can't believe people let this slide.

Visuals aside, I was sincerely hoping this game wouldn't be just GTA in the Wild West, but that's exactly what it is. Sure, the combat is not as ass as it was in the GTA 3 trilogy, and there's some nice physics, but the mission design and the way the game is structured is exactly as bad as in GTA 3. In addition there seems to be more of an emphasis on story, which just seems painfully boring. This game must've been written by the same people that wrote the GTA games because they seem to think that quirky and/or charismatic characters pass for good storytelling, even if they don't say anything important or meaningful.

After the poorly masqueraded tutorial missions, I drove around from town to town just to see how the game is structured. It's exactly the same formula as in GTA 3: go to characters, do frustrating and boring missions to unlock more of the map, go to new characters, repeat. Plus there seems to be this weird obsession with realism. Just like in GTA 4, you can do a lot of activities that are neither fun nor meaningful and seem to only be present there for flavor. And, just like in GTA 4, everything is accompanied by long unskippable animations, because it would probably be too "gamey" to just use text and sounds like the old games.

The one thing I liked are the events you randomly run into in the wild, but that's not enough to convince me to invest 17+ hours into this.

After an hour and a half, I'm tired. Because really it's more than that. It's all those countless hours I've spent playing the old GTA games. At least those had vibrant beautiful worlds and embraced the fun essence of being a video game. RDR is the same old product wrapped in a new, less appealing packaging.